


Reunion Will Crumb

by Crowmunculus



Category: No. 6 (Anime & Manga), No. 6 - All Media Types, No. 6 - Asano Atsuko
Genre: M/M, Post-Series, Reunion, callout post for myself, the inhabitants of this Dwelling are gay and love garbage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-31
Updated: 2018-07-31
Packaged: 2019-06-19 14:23:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,132
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15511773
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Crowmunculus/pseuds/Crowmunculus
Summary: Nezumi returns. Shion can't remember the last time he washed his bedsheets. Reunion crumbs.Originally written for the No. 6 Zine.





	Reunion Will Crumb

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the fantastic and FREE No. 6 Zine, which can (and should) be downloaded [here](https://no6zine.tumblr.com/get). 
> 
> This is a raunchier, more NSFW draft than the one published in the zine, because my inner child is perpetually fourteen years old and still thinks "that's what she said" jokes are the pinnacle of humor. I'd say this is a T rating but it's verging on an M.

The breaking point shattered in early July three summers later. It was a simple decision, once Nezumi allowed himself to be honest about it. Life as a wandering street musician was far less romantic in reality than he had been led to believe. Reality had more bedbugs. And scurvy. Two and a half years of less-than-romantic reality paled in contrast with those few ephemeral weeks with Shion at his mama’s bakery, with a steady stream of free pastries, a sturdy roof over his head, and best of all, a warm bed every night with Shion in it.

In the kind of cruel irony that defined so much of his life, the farther away Nezumi traveled, the more he (secretly, guiltily) wanted to go back. Once he stopped fighting it, the choice to return was simple. The journey back itself was the complicated part, but a combination of hitchhiking, trainhopping, and roughing it in the wilderness saw Nezumi back into No. 6 within a week and change to spare before Shion’s birthday. He considered waiting until the 7th, but barely two days into idling outside of the city his stir-crazy impatience won out.

At some point Shion had moved out of the bakery and into one of the new row houses that had been hastily built in the wake of the Holy Day. It was two stories with a steep staircase to a second-floor patio and a sliding glass door open wide with warm lamplight from within spilling out into the late summer night. It could be an invitation - or it could be because it was still 90 ungodly degrees at eleven at night and like hell that little house had A/C. It barely had enough backyard for Nezumi to anxiously brood in, but he made do in the narrow strip of greenbelt between patio and fence.

He walked toward the staircase with his mouth dry, head whining with white noise screaming loud as the cicadas. Shion still scared the shit out of him, but through the temperance of time, distance, and marginal gains in emotional maturity, he knew it was less _Shion_ and more what Shion made him _feel_.

Nezumi’s feet took him up the stairs before his brain caught up with them and then before he was ready, after years of trying to make himself be ready, there, circled by no less than six box fans, was Shion. This Shion, in briefs and a tank top with shaggy white hair pasted wet against the sides of his face, was sweatier than the Shion in Nezumi’s memory, but Nezumi was also sweatier than he had imagined he would be in this moment. Bedbugs, scurvy, and sweatiness: the human experience.

But then Shion looked up from his computer and his eyes found Nezumi’s eyes from across the room, across two and a half years of separation, and when he smiled all of Nezumi’s thoughts and fears dissolved away, his vision scoured of everything except the purifying brilliance of Shion’s smile and the tears gathering at his eyelashes.

“Don’t cry,” he said, stupidly, now betrayed by his mouth as well. He stood there at the threshold, arms limp at his sides, helpless, clueless on what to do next. Shion always tripped him up like this, from the very first night they met, his open, honest displays of unfiltered emotion betrayed every social rule Nezumi had learned by rote to keep him alive in the West Block, and he was powerless against it. Nothing else, no one else ever taught Nezumi how to deal with genuine tears, or what to do when he was their cause.

“It’s okay,” Shion said, sniffling wetly, “I’m happy. I’m so happy you’re here.” He stood up from his chair and stepped forward into the hold of arms Nezumi could not remember extending; this much, at least, ran on instinct. He didn’t know what he was supposed to say – apologize? Play it cool, pretend he was in control and all was going according to plan? Spill out all his secrets like vomit, how lost he was without Shion, how lonely? – but it didn’t matter because Shion pressed his body closer in and stole all Nezumi’s unspoken words out his mouth with a kiss.

This was instinct, too, a language Nezumi spoke. Kissing Shion should be terrifying but it was as easy and natural as breathing. Shion stepped backwards as Nezumi stepped further into the bedroom, Shion guiding him around the fans and haphazard stacks of laundry and other detritus, until the backs of Shion’s knees brushed against the mattress. His hands, cupped around Nezumi’s face, suddenly pulled away, then latched on again at Nezumi’s hips and just as suddenly Shion spun them in place rough enough to knock Nezumi backwards onto the bed.

Before Nezumi could open his mouth to complain, Shion all but flung himself on top of him with one knee to either side of Nezumi’s waist and his tongue shoved ungracefully into Nezumi’s tonsils. ‘What the fuck, Shion?’ was shortened to an indignant “Gllrphbyrfrfn?” Shion uttered a similarly undecipherable phrase back at him, still kissing with the seeming intent of choking him.

_I would rather choke on a different part of you_ ran through Nezumi’s head as something to say to fluster Shion, get the upper hand again, but before Nezumi could pull away and say it Shion’s hands migrated from their tame hold on Nezumi’s hips up underneath his shirt. Shion’s hands slid up Nezumi’s torso and the shirt traveled with them, pulled up to his neck. Shion stopped kissing only long enough to pull the shirt off over Nezumi’s head and drop it onto the floor somewhere, and likely would have continued trying to lick the back of Nezumi’s throat if Nezumi didn’t quickly say, “You don’t need to try so hard.”

Shion stilled his advances, blinked. “What do you mean?”

“Ease up on the tongue. I need to breathe. I think you’ll agree that breathing is important.”

“Oh. Right, sorry,” Shion said, with a sheepish grimace of a grin that showed too many teeth. He kissed Nezumi again, gentler this time but still sloppy, overeager. Then his wandering hands resumed their warpath, unlatching Nezumi’s belt before shoving both hands down Nezumi’s pants. He pulled those off, too, fully off of the right leg and left to dangle bunched around the left knee when Shion found a new distraction in the form of groping Nezumi’s bare chest.

Shion’s sweaty palms skidded across Nezumi’s skin, smearing muddy streaks with all the accumulated dirt of Nezumi’s travels. He wasn’t exactly complaining about Shion’s enthusiasm, but a hot shower would be nice, and he’d feel a lot sexier if it didn’t look like Shion was making mud pies on his pecs. As he tried to think of how to communicate this, his train of thought rapidly derailing into the concept of a hot shower with Shion in it, Shion pushed at his shoulders until Nezumi fell fully back against the mattress.

_Crumch._

Beds should not be crunchy. That was not a good sound to hear in the middle of making out. Shion kissed on undeterred, but Nezumi shifted underneath him to try and find the source of the unwanted sound effect. It felt like his back was coated in crackly bits of sand and something lumpier, maybe a rock, was creeping down the back of his hiked-down briefs. He squeezed one of his hands between the bed and his back, fished around, and with the same instinctive sense of creeping dread that alerted him to disasters before they began, he withdrew the object from between his ass cheeks and revealed it to the light: a stale wedge of fossilized bread crust.

Oh, god. Similar swiping at the “sand” stuck to his back proved it to be thousands upon thousands of crispy crumbs, desiccated stir fry vegetables and hardened soba, a lost kingdom of pulverized ramen. What was that crunchy bit in his hair? Was it _moving_? No more bedbugs. Never again the bedbug times. Nezumi jolted upward, pushing Shion off in his horrified haste of scratching his scalp and plucking anything suspicious out of his hair.

A wet, gurgly sniffle came from the other side of the bed, pulling Nezumi out of his combing. He looked over to Shion and saw his sweaty face and realized, with every bit as much of horror as he’d felt with his crunchy revelation, that some of that wet sheen was tears. A distressingly large amount appeared to be tears, and had Nezumi really been so caught in the moment he hadn’t realized Shion had never stopped crying?

“Sorry,” Shion said quietly, barely audible over the fans. He started to step off of the bed but Nezumi was faster, snatched his wrist and pulled him back close. Nezumi kissed the knuckles of Shion’s captured hand, one by one, as slow and tender as he knew how to be, until the stiff tension in Shion’s body bled away.

“I’m sorry,” Shion repeated, but this time he sounded more embarrassed than anything else, “Did I go too fast?”

Nezumi considered his dearth of clothing, the limited number of sentences spoken between them both in the past five minutes and the past two and a half years. “Maybe a little,” he admitted, “But the real problem is the bed.”

“The bed?” Shion asked. He had the nerve to look confused, as if he were immune to all the legions of abandoned scraps of old food doubtlessly stuck to his legs.

“Yes, the bed. It’s,” Nezumi hesitated, uncertain of how to politely say ‘there is stale bread stuck in my ass crack,’ concluded, “Crumby.”

Shion narrowed his eyes. Now he just looked annoyed, but at least he’d stopped crying. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, it’s a perfectly nice mattress.”

Typical clueless airhead. Some things never change, Nezumi thought with a half-stifled laugh. “No, I meant _crumb-y_ , as in it’s full of _crumbs_. What do you do, eat all of your meals here?”

“Not all of them!” Shion protested, which was enough to tell Nezumi that however many meals it was, it was too many, and Shion knew it.

“Have to say, all this has ruined my appetite for the night, sexual or otherwise,” Nezumi said, and squeezed Shion’s hand to let him know he wasn’t actually upset. Truthfully, it had been a long hike back into the city and he would rather spend the night sleeping with Shion in the literal sense – somewhere other than the bed, of course.

Shion squeezed his hand in return. “I can wash the sheets tomorrow. Work has had me...distracted.”

Nezumi noticed then, himself no longer hormonally distracted, that the rest of the room matched the unhygienic theme of the crumby bed, visibly dirty laundry and dishes in stacks on every available surface. He’d thought it was simple untidiness when Shion was guiding him to the bed, but this was something else entirely. “I can see that,” he said, gesturing at a pile that looked particularly like a modern art installation, “You’re copying my interior decorating style, I’m flattered.”

“I’m not copying you, I know it doesn’t look like it but all of this is _sorted_.”

“Sure it is.”

They bickered their way downstairs to the cramped little living room. Even in only the dim light filtering down from the top of the stairs, Nezumi could see more stacks of dirty dishes looming ominously like hazy mountains in the distance. He eyed the dark form of the dish-littered couch dubiously, squinting in the low light, and made an executive decision: “We’re sleeping under the stars tonight.”

They made a makeshift camp on the patio using two pillows appropriated from Shion’s bed and Nezumi’s travel-worn sleeping bag. Shion carefully rearranged his armada of fans so that they all faced outside the room to blow hot air (and doubtlessly crumbs) out at them, insisting that the air circulation would help them thermoregulate in the muggy heat. Nezumi magnanimously decided to let Shion believe that.

It was too hot for the sleeping bag, so they curled up together for sleep on top of it, Nezumi still half-naked and certain to provide Shion’s neighbors with enough gossip fodder to last them through the lean times of the coming winter. He smiled thinking about it. There was a strange, counterintuitive thrill in stability, knowing that he would still be in the same place months later, under the same roof, held in the same set of arms. He looked forward to it, even if he did not look forward to helping Shion decontaminate his house over the following days.

_I’m happy I’m here too, Shion._

Everything else could wait until morning. Nezumi kissed the crown of Shion’s sweaty head and tried to sleep.

 


End file.
